A new paper from MITRE takes an end-to-end look at how military strategy gets translated into the types of weapon systems actually bought through the acquisition process. It is called Five First Steps to a Modern Defense Budgeting System, and I was pleased to have the authors on the Acquisition Talk podcast to discuss it: Matt MacGregor, Greg Grant, and Pete Modigliani.
In the episode, we discuss
- What a challenge-driven Defense Planning Guidance could look like
- How special, “innovation” funds can be improved
- Oversight of Middle-Tier programs
- Imperative for new start authorities
Download the full-text transcript
Challenge Driven Budgets
Greg Grant opens with a critique of the National Defense Strategy as being too general to enable specific programmatic tradeoffs. It provides sweeping assessments and dominance on every domain. By contrast, the well-defined Cold War challenge was defeating a Soviet threat to NATO in central Europe. Today, it is likely defeating a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
We’re at a very different period today than we were, back when the NDS [2018] was written when people were very wary of even mentioning a competition or conflict with China. Now you have senior leaders openly talking about a war-fight with China. Spell it out in specifics, so that Congress, the public, they can all have open discussions about whether you making progress towards achieving these specific objectives. The most specific, the better.
Take the most complicated scenario we have, which is trying to defeat a PLA invasion of Taiwan. Break it down into the steps of what you need to achieve, what you need to be able to defeat that. That’s the challenge, if you will, and then hold the services again, that’s that hold them accountable.
I wonder how many challenges there could be, and how you prioritize between the challenges. Certainly, during the Cold War the US deterred aggression in central Europe. But contingencies that were generally unplanned for popped up such as in Korea, Vietnam, Iran, and Central America. In the 1950s, the nuclear threat was a clear challenge and it took a big culture shift from McNamara to move toward a “flexible response” that would be important for Vietnam.
At any rate, I think the challenge mindset does drive certain logical conclusions. As Matt points out, one of the enablers in a China conflict is a resilient, distributed force structure. For the Navy it is distributed maritime operations. For the Air Force, agile combat employment. But as Matt finds:
Conceptually, the Agile Combat Employment aligns with that. But then you look at the investments that the Air Force is making against it. They are not things you can just land on any old runway, anywhere, or things that are easy to maintain, like an F-35 or something or NGAD, or these advanced platforms. They’re really not the investments that actually show that joint vision is being achieved.
Collapsing Cycle Times
One of the major problems of pivoting and moving to scale in DoD is the linear, sequential nature of the whole process. One thing happens after another leading to long lags between strategic insight and program execution. As Pete said:
The process is linear and long. The services develop a budget, send it up to OSD, to OMB, to the Hill, and when the Hill is doing markups, the services know that’s already out of date and when it changes, the Hill gets ticked off that they’re not looking at an accurate picture. So the more we can shrink the timelines and get a iterative set of collaboration touchpoints should help throughout the budget life cycle.
He recognizes that the day-to-day concerns of processing documents can take priority over mission effectiveness:
There’s an awful lot of time spent developing documents, staffing them, begging people. Can you sign this? Oh, where’s that at in staffing? Oh, I think it needs to go to this person first. There’s so much wasted effort in the Pentagon over those types of things.
New starts is one of those prior approval requirements that can really hold back technology adoption. It literally takes an act of Congress to start a development project that’s more than $10 million or procurement greater than $20 million. That’s for the entire effort, not just a single year’s funding. DoD only submitted 17 new start requests in all of FY 2020.
A simple change they recommend is to make the same threshold apply to costs “for the fiscal year” rather than “for the entire effort.” That would allow DoD to get a new effort underway for $10 or $20 million while retaining Congressional control to veto it within 30 days or deny longer-term funding.
The dynamic environment DoD finds itself shouldn’t require a “mother may I” in every case. It is possible to have speed with rigor. In the paper, Matt, Greg, and Pete make 24 key recommendations
How to get change
Accelerating the responsiveness of acquisition to changes in threats, technologies, and CONOPS requires the Pentagon and Congress getting aligned and building trust. Greg pointed out that the defense reform caucus in the 1980s really prided itself on knowing the minutiae of weapon systems and enemy threats. Rebuilding that culture requires the Pentagon to illustrate the threats, wargaming scenarios, and show the capability gaps — for example the need to expand capacity of anti-ship missiles. That will filter through to the budget process so that when tradeoffs are made, perhaps leading to retirements or otherwise, there is already some alignment. Here’s a closing statement from Greg:
It’s our collective hope that the PPBE commission really makes some big muscle movements — really look at this in the aggregate and say “Are we losing the military technological competition? Or what are the trend lines on the relative military balance right now, and where are they going?” And if they’re not trending in the right direction, then we need to make some fundamental, big changes to the whole planning and budgeting process and the way we build programs.
As Einstein reportedly said, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. It is hard to imagine doubling down further on PPBE principles of rigorous analysis and process will lead to better results. Those principles were designed to control growth growth.
The risk today is time. Inventory projections from the “divest to invest” strategies in shipbuilding and aircraft create a massive risk right at the time China is expected to be the most threatening to Taiwan. A paradigm has to change to impact time. Requirements, acquisition, and contracting have all been perennially reformed for 50 years. It is time to connect those threads to the budget.
Thanks Matt, Greg, and Pete!
I’d like to thank Matt MacGregor, Greg Grant, and Pete Modigliani for joining me on the Acquisition Talk podcast. Be sure to read their new paper: Five First Steps to a Modern Defense Budgeting System as well as Pillars of the Modern Defense Budgeting System. Follow them on Twitter: @gregmgrant and @petemodi. Matt has a new blog Tao of Defense, and Pete has a newsletter that releases every Saturday you can sign up here.
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